Boot up your identity disc program, because TRON is the Greatest (i.e. Nerdiest) Movie EVER!
This episode features special guest host “Joey Snackpants” from Green Mustard Productions.
Click on the movie poster or the link above to download our review of the film.
Review in a Nutshell: Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner are digital warriors in the computer world, rescuing the pre-Internets from the evil Master Control Program. It doesn’t get much nerdier than this.
Behold the Horrors that this Movie hath Wrought upon the Web:
Tron Guy. You’ve seen it. You can’t un-see it.
The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast 
At least Tron Guy is wearing proper undergarments in that photo. The ones of him at home showing off the costume allow you to see…. um… the angle of the dangle.
Try scrubbing THAT mental image out of your minds, kids!
Gah! Paul, I can’t believe you missed the homoerotic subtext Flynn and Ram. I watched a screening of the film with alot of nerds a year ago and everyone was losing their @#%& over that scene.
Tron isn’t “bad.” Tron doesn’t “go all the way around to good, it’s so bad.” No, it’s just straight-up “good.” No irony, no qualifiers, no conditionals. It’s just awesome. If you do not like Tron or have not seen Tron, then I probably cannot be your friend. And yet something tells me that most people I know have never seen the movie…
Before I owned an Atari 5200 (for which my parents played more Pac-Man and Defender than I did), the first videogame I ever had in my life was a handheld Tron. There were three games on this thing: the disc combat, the light cycles, and taking out the MCP. My next door neighbors had Intellivision, and they had both Tron: Deadly Discs and Tron: Maze-a-Tron. I’m not going to even pretend to know as much about this movie as Ken, but Tron was definitely one of my major childhood favorites such that years later around 1995-ish when that Simpsons Halloween special came on with the “Homer in 3D” bit where the joke was that nobody in the town had seen Tron, I thought that was hilarious because EVERYONE’S seen Tron. Then the next day at school, it turned out that NOBODY had seen Tron after all. Bleah.
Tron 2.0 is absolutely fantastic, though you will want to apply the latest patches which make the light cycle races optional/skippable. It was made by Monolith who’s made pretty much all of my favorite PC FPS titles: Blood (the first one), Shogo (shut up, this ruled), No One Lives Forever I and II (the latter being perhaps the only time they ever made a sequel that was better than the original), and F.E.A.R. Much like the film itself, the visuals of that game have not dated themselves one bit due to the graphical stylization. I may be wrong about this–perhaps it was fixed via patches–but you may need to install a Glide wrapper for the full experience, as I recall the flickering effect from the piping as not being supported by Direct3D at the time.
We didn’t really get a chance to discuss it, but I too would say that TRON is an unqualified, unironic good. It has some goofy writing and some outlandish premises, but I wouldn’t call it bad by any stretch of the imagination. However, straight-up good movies are difficult to talk about, which is probably why we spent so much time talking about the outstanding visuals and technical achievements of the film – as well as the film’s cultural and historical impact – and less time talking about the movie itself.
Just in time for the sequel. This is a good one.
HOLY CRAP!!!! All there years and I never got the joke. Thank you Daryl.
GOD MY EYES!!!!! This is almost as bad as fat guy in sailor Moon costume……Oh God, now THAT’S stuck in my head as well. KILL ME NOW, FOR PITY’S SAKE!!!!!
Huge fan of the show,
but I just wanted to say that “The Money Pit” is not a good movie.
One of your best episodes. And I agree — there’s no irony needed to love TRON. It’s a fantastic movie.
My favorite part of the commentary is actually about my favorite line in the whole movie, when Sark yells “Send in the logic probe!” and the writer on commentary cracks up and goes, “Logic probe???”
One of the guy’s who wrote a bunch of the stuff that went into the TRON computer animation software teaches at NYU. Kids reading this, take Ken Perlin’s classes.
It funny that Joey said “show on Disney Vault” cause that how I saw.
A weak ago, I realize that classics are not really the best of the best so most that there thing that have a big impact in it field. I will also said there a non-irony love for Tron, but at the same time I doubt a lot people now will not like it because The concept of Tron has been use by so many since it come out and that usual weakling the movie (like Alfred Hitchcock The Birds).
It was years later when I finally found out what a LOGIC PROBE was… imagine my disappointment when I found out that it wasn’t used to break down doors…
I re-watched before I listened to this podcast and finally saw it widescreen as when I saw it in the theater after so many years of renting the pan and scan VHS. It holds up okay even though it’s dated and silly. It’s fun.
I kind of assumed that the logic probe got the name because of TRON, not the other way around. But I also did no research whatsoever when formulating that mythology.
Noticed Daryl mentioning having a small electronic Tron game to play with. I had that same thing too I got for Christmas one year (probably ’82). I loved that TOMY-branded thing, though I also had the 2600, an Intellivision (with the TRON games that were on that), a ColecoVision, and a ton of those other LED game dealys too, so my introduction into video games and TRON was obvious for a 5 year old who was raised on the wrong things!
I didn’t see TRON however until probably ’84 and through The Disney Channel as well (though that channel actually began in ’83 but wasn’t added on my cable service until ’84). Perhaps I was still too young and naive to take in the cheesiness of it all, but as Joey Snackpants had said, the 80’s arcade world was totally different. That’s the world I wanted to be in, but nowadays I come off as a weirdo. Nobody likes to listen to my ideas.
While not talking much about Steven Lisberger, prior to TRON, he mostly did short projects like TV commercials out of his Boston studio. In 1973, he won a Student Academy Award for this effort he made called “Cosmic Cartoon”…
In the late 70’s, through whatever reasoning, an idea for a film about athletic competition set around the 1980 Olympics was set into motion called “Animalympics”. I don’t feel like discussing this right now since it eventually led to the horrors of the Furry Fandom that followed (maybe not that bad, but some people take it too seriously)!
One of those stories about the production of the film (and why it was done that way) involved how they had to hire a studio in Taiwan to farm out the coloring/matting of those “Kodaliths” for every frame of film those characters where on screen in the computer world. The DVD commentary track (which I assume is the same as the old LD one) said how the studio realized the cost and time they were getting themselves into on trying to get this thing finished and had to make the decision to send it to “Cuckoo’s Nest”, a studio probably best known for cranking out the usual Saturday morning toonage for much of the 80’s and 90’s, leading to the list of untranslated Chinese names in the end credits that a friend of mine has taken the task to try to translate all of ’em to include on IMDB one day (he’s waiting for the Blu Ray release to be sure).
The Disney studio and their woes during that point in time is certainly one that probably would make for an interesting talk one day elsewhere pertaining to the end of the Ron Miller era and the decisions made over releasing such ballsy films like Tron or even Never Cry Wolf under the Disney banner (in the latter, you have a guy running naked with the wolves and caribou, that definitely fits in well with the Disney image does it?). Tron’s less-than-steller box office return of course probably didn’t help it got released during such a blockbuster-filled summer of hits like a certain Spielburg pic that needs not be mentioned here. I remember being in the theater for that one however, and those memories were forever cemented by the fact the cinema (now about to be demolished in town) had curtains that opened and closed during the presentation. You do not get that today, and it’s sad.
I also loved “The Money Pit” so you’re not alone!